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Web 2.0 Conference: Viacom's Dauman on Google

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was not making any conciliatory noises about Google and YouTube during an onstage interview this morning.

Dauman?? company is prominent among those that today announced a set of principles for dealing with various copyrights rights issues on the Web.

Viacom, you may recall, is also prominent among those that have sued Google for YouTube-related copyright infringement.

Google is not among the players that have signed onto the aforementioned principles. Although they did announce earlier this week that they were finalyl unveiling a technological fix for spotting copyrighted content on YouTube.

He also questioned how serious Google’s announcement was. In prior conversations with the company, he said Google had told him A copyright-spotting system would be in place by the end of ‘06: “We’ve been hearing about this for quite some time.”

Google “can do things very quickly when they want to,” he said. But in this case, he said, “I guess they haven’t wanted to.”

In any event, Dauman does not sound thrilled with the entire concept of Google creating its own fingerprinting technoloyg for YouTube: “No one wants a proprietary system that benefits one company to the exclusion of the others.” (Other signatories onto today’s announcement: Disney, Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media [read MySpace], CBS, NBC Universal, Veoh, and DailyMotion.)

Dauman is thus setting up a sort of rhetorical trap-door: When has Google ever shared technologies?